The Metropolitan police force will no longer use the label black-on-black.
The force has used the label to describe shootings involving black
victims and suspects.

Assistant commissioner Tarique Ghaffur acknowledges the label causes
black communities to feel stigmatised. Ghaffur says: “we [the
police] do not want to stigmatise communities and will avoid any language
which gives rise to that impression” (1).

Such sentiments from any other public service than the Metropolitan
police would be cause for rejoice. As things stand, this apparent
enlightened approach to race relations must be taken with a very large
pinch of salt.

The Metropolitan police force subjects blacks to vicious gratuitous
acts of injustice. For example, it is responsible for most “unlawful
killing” of blacks. Furthermore, the force produces each label
which links a particular crime to an ethnic minority.

So for example we have “honour killing” linked to Asians.
For Afro-Caribbean, there are mugging, carjacking, ritual killing.
And as the Economist notes: “London's police have ownership
of .... black-on-black crime”.

Given the Met’s liking for stirring racial hatred by linking
such crimes to ethnic minorities, why has it chosen to stop using
the label “black-on-black”? Put simply, as a propaganda
soundbite, the label has served it purpose. It is now redundant.

As with claims of cannibalism (2) (Finnegan 1988:97), the Met imported
black-on-black and its use from South African Apartheid. Under Apartheid,
police vigilantes would murder anti-Apartheid activists. The police
would then blame the ANC for the murder, calling it “black-on-black
violence” (Finnegan 1988:137).

In the Britain, police have used black-on-black in conjunction with
gun crime to link black communities with cocaine trafficking, the
trade in crack and gang warfare.

Black-on-black was used in a propaganda campaign to win political
support for the introduction of visas for Jamaican visitors to Britain.
In January 2003, David Blunkett, the home secretary, made visas mandatory
for Jamaican visitors.

Since then police have continued to use black-on-black to describe
shootings where the victims are black and the racial profile of the
gunmen is unknown. This is the case with the double homicide of Bertram
Byfield and his daughter, Toni Ann, in Kensal Green, northwest London
on September 14,2003.

However, a spate of well-publicised shootings involving white same
race victims and gunmen has left police groping to maintain their
stereotype of gun-crime as a black-on-black phenomenon.

Their effort received a major setback with the fatal shooting of a white police
officer by a white gunman, David Bieber, in Leeds on Boxing Day. This
tragic shooting was made the more gruesome by the grotesque efforts
of the police to race the killing by describing Bieber’s complexion
as “olive” (3).

With the true extent of same race shootings involving whites becoming
apparent to the public, police have been forced by circumstances to
abandon using black-on-black when describing homicides involving guns.

However, as sure as eggs are eggs, the Metropolitan police will continue
to produce stereotypes linking crimes to ethnic minorities.

The mindset capable of dreaming up “olive” as a skin
complexion will exhaust the colour spectrum before ending racial profiling.
However the cops should realise olives come in two colours: black
and green. And black men are from Jamaican; green men from Mars.